Hilma af Klint: The Beyond

Poster courtesy of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan

Hilma af Klint: The Beyond
The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan
March 4 to June 15, 2025

Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) produced abstract work that was way ahead of contemporaries like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Though she produced more than 1,000 paintings, she kept her work secret and was only “discovered” by art critics and academics in the 1980s. Hilma af Klint never married, lived only with women and was part of a group of women called The Five which explored ideas around spirituality and mysticism, leading some to speculate about her queerness. Whatever her orientation and identity, her work is definitely amazing. The exhibition will bring together some 140 works that were rarely exhibited during the artist’s lifetime nor for many years after. The Ten Largest (1907), a set of ten paintings over three meters high and many of the other works are shown for the first time in Japan.